The publishing world is all a buzz today after Apple’s announcement yesterday. Apple released an update to iBooks – welcome iBooks2. There has been much hype around these updates as it recognises the move towards digital reading and consuming of content, with Apple particularly targeting the Textbook market.
The textbooks that are to be sold through iBooks 2 will give students a more interactive learning experience which ultimately aims to enable students to get better results. Apple has some key textbook publishers on board too for this latest venture including Pearson and McGraw Hill.
So with this new announcement from Apple we thought we’d let you into a few tips and tricks of our own that will enable you too to get your content; whether that is a book, magazine or even your company blog into iBooks using 3D Issue. And guess what, it really is pretty straightforward!
Tutorial 1 – PDF to iBooks
1) Import your PDF to 3D Issue
Launch the 3D Issue software (Lite, Pro or Enterprise) and click on ‘Create New’. Select the PDF that you want to convert. This now uploads the PDF into the software and you are ready to make any amends to the publication.
2) Make any edits required
In 3D Issue, navigate to the DESIGN tab, and select the ‘eBook reader mode’ from the selection box on the right of the screen (highlighted in red below). This takes you into the eReader mode (opposed to digital magazine mode which creates digital editions for viewing via a web browser)
Here you can make edits such as; formatting, add/edit text or images, add table of contents and front cover.
3. Publish your ‘eBook’
Once you are happy with the way the book looks, head over to the OUTPUT tab. On the left hand side, check the EBOOK option. Tip: check the ‘epub’ to create a version for iPad and iPhone iBooks, but also check the ‘Kindle’ to create a publication for download on Kindle eReaders too. Then, click BUILD.
4) Download to your iPad, and upload to your site to allow your readers to download
Once the software has created the epub and kindle files, you can access these from the message that appears:
Locate the ‘ebook’ folder, you will then see the two files; epub (for iPad) and mobi (for Kindle). Open iTunes on your computer, connect your iPad and drag and drop the epub file from your computer into the ‘Books’ section in iTunes. You will now see your publication in iTunes, and when synced with your iPad, you can see the publication in iBooks:
and here is the publication on the iPad available for reading in iBooks:
Try it out for yourself!
Download the 3D Issue trial where you can follow these steps to create your own book for iBooks from your own PDFs.
Or
Here is the epub we created in the above tutorial, it is the 3D Issue user manual, you can download this epub, put into iTunes and then sync it to your iPad or iPhone and read in iBooks.
Download the epub to view on your iPad in iBooks
You can of course do this to, upload the file to your site to allow your readers to download a epub of your content to view on their iPad through iBooks – and remember Extra Tip: because this is in iBooks, the reader does not need to be online to view once they have downloaded.
Coming up next…. how to publish your blog or RSS feeds to a epub and view them in iBooks!
